


The Trouble with Breakfast

by keerawa



Category: Provost's Dog - Tamora Pierce, Tortall - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Crimes & Criminals, F/M, POV Alternating, POV Female Character, POV First Person, POV Male Character, Police, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-22
Updated: 2011-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-27 18:58:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/298979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/keerawa/pseuds/keerawa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <div class="center">
<br/><p><i>A Dog and a Rat<br/>sat on the floor,<br/>arguing over pasty pie.</i></p>
<p><i>A purple-eyed Cat<br/>laughed at them both.<br/>He knew the real reason why.</i><br/></p>
</div>
            </blockquote>





	The Trouble with Breakfast

**Author's Note:**

  * For [katayla](https://archiveofourown.org/users/katayla/gifts).



I’ve always despised Dogs.

Not for the reasons you might think. Not because they’re dangerous, or get in the way of business. In my experience, they aren’t, and they don’t.

You see, I come from nothing. I was apprenticed to a piper named Gregor in a village on the eastern edge of Scanra. He’d bought me from my family. Gregor was never shy about letting me know what a worthless piece of trash he’d gotten for his five coppers, and I took it until the day I was big enough to wrench the whip out of the cuddy’s hand and let him see how he liked it.

I went to the city, and found that my old master was right. Everything and everyone in it was owned. Owned by the lords and the mages and the knights up in the keep; owned by the bully-boys in armor they paid to keep the rest of us crawling in the dirt.

At least, that’s how it looked.

Some of the alley-rats were better fed than the rest. They had claws, and teeth, and they knew how to use them.

I learned my craft from the best. I learned sweet-talk from Marietta, who could con a miser out of his last gold coin and leave him smiling. I learned to fight from Aris, a beautiful dancer and an artist with a blade. Old Jacob, who could pocket a viper’s fang before it had time to strike, taught me a thing or two. I even took some lessons from ‘The Mist’, a second-story man so accomplished that he stole items too unique, too hot to sell, just for the joy of taking them from the smug loaners who believed they were safe behind locked doors.

The Mist died one night, skull smashed between a cobblestone street and a Dog’s lead-weighted baton.

Dogs. _Dogs._ Say it once more with feeling, with a hiss and a curl of the lip, and then spit out the bad taste it leaves in your mouth.

Dogs were the ones too stupid to survive on the street and too undisciplined to be soldiers. Fat and lazy. Blind, deaf, and dumb, and I don’t mean quiet. They were loud-mouthed and foul-mouthed, except for when they were licking the boots of provosts and ladies and merchants. Bottom-feeders, content to live off the Happy Bag and bribes, begging for scraps from their master’s table.

There were a few exceptions to the rule, but I’d never met a Dog worth more than the coin it took to buy him off.

Not until the day I met a Puppy with ice-blue eyes by the name of Beka Cooper.

* * *

Rats are a pox on the city.

When my ma first brought home a new cove, I thought perhaps things were changing for the better. She smiled, for the first time since Da died. He was always bringing her gifts – pretty little things like I’d never seen before. I knew, even then, that he’d no real job. Of course I knew. But jobs were scarce, in the Lower City, and who was I to judge how he looked after us? I’d been known to lift a copper piece or a pasty myself, when the little ones needed to eat. Then, when Ma started coughing up blood, the scut beat her bad and disappeared one night along with all those little gifts she’d thought to sell for healing magic.

I found him. I followed him. No one much cares what a gixie gets up to, in the Lower City. I haunted taverns and boarding houses, scales and the Nightmarket. I saw what he did. It wasn’t just my ma he hurt. He filched from merchants and doxies, roughed up muggers for their coin, canoodled with a pretty mot and then stole her necklace at knife-point. He strutted round like he could take whatever he wanted, and no one could touch him, because they were too afraid of him and his gang.

I wasn’t afraid.

I Dogged him ‘til I knew every nasty little trick his gang got up to, and all their hidey holes. I went to the kennel to report on ‘em, and when none there would listen, I went to my Lord Provost himself. He hobbled every last one, then brought my family up to live with him.

Rats are bad enough in the other districts, in Flash and Prettybone, Highfields and Temple. But scummer flows downhill, and the worst of them end up in the Lower City. Them as can see a mot scraping by to feed her children on her weavings, and take what little she has, so it’s sell one gixie to the slavers or watch all of ‘em starve? That’s beyond greed. It’s pure wickedness.

Rats get away with worse in the Cesspool than they would in anywhere else. There’s not enough Dogs to keep an eye on all them as needs it, and the people, _my_ people, are too poor to be paying for protection of their own. So when my Lord Provost asked me what district I’d choose to serve as a Puppy, I told him it was the Lower City for me.

I thought I’d make friends with the good, strong Dogs down there, and get my teeth in some Rats. Never figured I’d be eating breakfast with ‘em.

* * *

The thing about breakfast is that it’s an intimate meal. You’re just waking up, hair in disarray, mind muddled with the last remnants of dreams. It’s a meal meant to be shared with family, or between lovers.

And yet I found myself eating breakfast every morning with Kora, Aniki, and Beka’s entire pack of Dogs. They’re a lively bunch – Verene, always ready to burst into song, Ersken making eyes at Kora, Phelan with a quip and a laugh. Dogs all. We didn’t talk shop – no need to tempt fate by shoving a Dog’s nose in how Aniki and I spent our days. There was a freedom to it, because while some might think a Dog to be a Rat’s natural enemy, I knew in my bones there was nothing more deadly than my competition, the other Rats. So breakfast was … easy.

It had started simply enough. I was impressed with the pretty young Puppy who’d lifted a purse off me smooth enough to win Old Jacob's approval, and bold enough to demand two silver coins to tell me what was in it. I needed a home base away from any of the local chiefs and their hang-outs, so I could establish my own alliances. Beka’s building was comfortable, well-kept, and central. If it also bought me a chance to charm my way into the Puppy’s britches, well, that was just a bonus.

News of my breakfasts with Beka got out among the other Rats. In fact, rumor had me wick-deep in Beka’s affections every night, and I did nothing to discourage the whispers. Apparently Kayfer’s predecessor had held far more cordial relations with the Dogs than the present Rogue was willing or able to maintain. A close friendship with the Puppy assigned to the most respected pair of Dogs in the Lower City, the ones with the brass to collect the Happy Bag from the Court of the Rogue, gave me an edge among the older Rats.

Those Rats thought I could influence her to smooth their way in the City. They didn’t know Beka well enough to realize that she’d never let anyone sweet-talk her a single step away from what she thought was right. If that mot decided the moon was causing trouble in her district, she’d Dog the thing down below the horizon and bring it up on charges before the King’s Court.

I flirted. Beka blushed, and stammered, and turned me down a hundred times. When I pushed harder, as had won me many a mot’s appreciation before, her eyes would go cold and her spine straight.

If Beka were ever to invite me into her bed, I’d accept in a heartbeat. But I know full well she never will. There’s a line, somewhere in Beka’s mind, between Rats and Dogs. I wasn’t sure where it was, but I knew that if I ever stepped across it, I’d find myself hobbled in an instant.

And that’s the trouble with breakfast.

* * *

The trouble with breakfast is that it made me lose track of what’s important.

I wanted to be friends with Rosto. I really did. He was a handsome cove, with a fine sense of humor, and loyal as the day was long. Just friends, though. Much as he made my peaches tingle, he was a Rat. I remembered the cove that broke my ma’s heart too well to look to him for more.

Even that was spoiled the day Rosto came strutting down Koskynen like he owned it, with a bloody slice on his cheek and a glint in his eye. The day he became the Rogue.

Sure, sometimes a Dog has to turn a blind eye; let the minnows go to catch the murderers and the kidnappers. I’d told myself breakfast with Rosto was more of the same. I was being a good Dog, developing my sources of information.

But how can I, now he’s turned my own home into the Rogue’s headquarters? Knowing that for every theft and murder-for-hire, every mugging and counterfeit coin, every wickedness that my people suffer to line someone’s pockets – Rosto the Piper is taking his cut.

I can’t. Not and be the kind of Dog I want to be.

When I tell him I’m putting a stop to it, he doesn’t even have the decency to look surprised.


End file.
